The Grand Budapest Hotel
(2014)

GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL recounts the adventures of Gustave H, a legendary concierge at a famous European hotel between the wars, and Zero Moustafa, the lobby boy who becomes his most trusted friend. The story involves the theft and recovery of a priceless Renaissance painting and the battle for an enormous family fortune -- all against the back-drop of a suddenly and dramatically changing Continent.

Love. There are points during “ The Grand Budapest Hotel ,” at which it simply floods off the screen. It sounds too lofty perhaps, but how else can you describe the level of minute care that seems to have gone into every single frame, every costume, every tear in every strip of wallpaper? If nothing else (and there is quite a lot else) the film is at times perhaps the apotheosis of Wes Anderson ’s aesthetic: a glorious, mischievous sequence of pictorialist plays taking place in a world so perfectly contained it might as well be in a snowglobe. This trademark fetishistic detail makes it feel like it was somehow loved into being, and, for whole passages, we loved it right back, giddily grinning in the dark, already mentally marking out those moments when we’re going to have to hit pause to examine the background, the edge of the frame, the ...Read full article»